She stepped into his house as if she had been there many times before. "Do you still want to have a sandwich?" She asked him as she twirled her way around the kitchen and opened different cabinets to find what she needed.
His head was heavy with thoughts of sleep and his throat was dry with things he wished to say. He rested his forehead on the table that he colored on when he was a child. On the chair he sat on, a little purple stick figure struck some odd awkward pose with his cape frozen in a semblance of a breeze.
"Alice," He said, his words a garbled mess against the table. "What are you doing here? I stayed home sick today."
She looked at him like he was missing something. "I know that," She chided, placing the perfectly made sandwich in front of his gripping hands. "That's why I'm here."
She made a startling move backwards and he felt that apathetic feeling of something incredibly wrong. His skin crawled in a sudden unease and he huffed a breath that was a whisper of a word.
There was a moment of indecision on her face before it cleared and she backed up towards the single window above the sink where a soft ray of light would make her skin sparkle.
That look of utter indecision was so profound, that even as things began to blur and his body began to break, when he was caught in something beyond hell, he would remember it.
And hate her for it.
His fingers were long and calloused, almost feminine with the way they curved in that off set position that beckoned.
The skin was dry and cracked and the hairline fractures were filled with red and black. Past memories that had her tongue push against the back of her teeth, as if trying to keep the words from escaping. She twisted her lips and tilted her head down so all she could see were their hands resting beside each other.
With a soft hesitance that wasn't really a question, she brushed one of her own fingers against one of his and suddenly felt her vulnerability like an invisible piece of glass that isn't seen until it's too late. The softness of her skin, the almost disgusting delicateness, was so very paramount when she looked at his.
Her eyes flinched up to his own when his hand made an almost startled movement, appearing to just notice that she was there. Green eyes that were sunken on his face made a sweeping look to take her in and his lips quirked in his splintered little smile.
Her shoulders caved ever so slightly and she attempted to return what he gave her, but by the way his eyes seemed to fade even more on his disappearing face while he leaned back even farther so that the shadows became his skin, told her in an easy cadence that she failed.
Her face twisted.
She tried to say his name, as if that would make up for it. She felt the loss of reality so acutely the past few days. She knew it had to have been a large amount of time. There was no way that it couldn't have been. Not with the way she was feeling, not with the way she was breaking.
And that was what was happening. She was breaking. The words pounded in her head and she tried to say his name again. It was there, lost in the sudden blaring of noise that was so much it had no distinct sound.
"Bella," He said, his head tilting ever so slightly, his features becoming discernable once more. The sudden silence was a whispering boom in her chest.
"Edward," She sighed, her body caving forward so that when her cheek touched the cool stone floor she was a touch away from his hand. The sad long fingered hand that wouldn't move.
She cleared her throat. "How long," She paused as if to give the words some alternative meaning. "How long do you think it's been?" She wished she could swallow them just as soon as she said them.
His laughter was a muted thing. "I don't know, Bella." He twisted his body so his back curved and his chest faced the other direction but his face was tilted towards her.
Bella moved closer to his hand and then carefully, entwined her own with his.
His eyes shuttered and his hand made an odd convulsing movement. Almost comfortingly he began to slide his away, as if he was afraid that if he pulled away too quickly and too soon that she would be offended by it. 'I won't be,' she almost said, wondering if that would have made up for what she would do next.
She tightened her grip until it was no longer a pretend situation where he would make up a series of circumstances that involved her accidentally holding his hand. It was now obvious and no longer avoidable.
He moved closer to her for a moment. His body still awkwardly held but slowly shifting until half breathed words touched her temple. He used more force the next time when he pulled away and she thought briefly of still not allowing it. His fingers were a lost sensation against her palm as they moved.
Bella felt the heat of something akin to shame. "I'm sorry," She said, the words too loud.
Edward's glazed eyes focused on her and then cleared ever so slightly. "No," He said. "I'm sorry." But he didn't do anything else and he most definitely didn't return his hand so that she could hold something while her world crumbled. What he did do though was sit close to her and hum like he had done the second day, or what she perceived to be the second day, she had been there.
Time had dragged on and had become a limitless fear that she had no way to control. She could guess at how time had passed by how filthy she had become and how many times she had, had to push away her pride and pretend that was happening wasn't, when she was forced to go the bathroom. The mortifying experience had included another filthy bucket not unlike the one that had been her friend the first few nights she had been there when she had seen nothing but a dark red liquid and an even more hideous smile.
She had stood on shaking legs and had whispered her question of what to do to Edward with an almost angry exclamation. His lips had parted and his head lolled down to his right shoulder. His smile was an attempt at comforting as he called out in a voice that didn't know how to scream to the girl that had brought them food. Who had often times forgot to bring food.
The girl, Jillian, who she had realized was never very far away, had pulled Bella out of the room and down a hallway that she couldn't really see. Jillian had given a twitching nervous smile and said, "Well, there's no such thing as privacy." What had followed was an imitation of being alone with Jillian turning her back and having to use a bucket that sat in the corner. "They didn't think to have any plumbing down here," was the almost apology.
When she had returned, Edward had briefly pressed his hand to her shoulder but moved away as everything became too much. His eyes had been too knowing and she had curled herself away from him. The irrational anger that somehow everything was his fault had made her cold.
Bella sighed and raised her eyes to the ceiling that she couldn't see. She wondered how high it was. The darkness that was everywhere was a thicker tangible thing that was like the sun in a way. The way that made it so you thought that if you kept running to it, eventually you could touch it and in the way that made you hurt to look.
Everything was quiet, as it always was with the exception of the Edward's shallow breath that was always just a little quicker and harsher that it should have been. It was almost like he couldn't get enough oxygen. The thought was frightening. Far more frightening than the walls that seemed to move and whisper things when she was in that lull between sleep and consciousness.
"Talk to me?" Bella asked. The, 'please,' and unspoken thing between them.
He nodded but still didn't say anything. The soft heat of his arm resting close to hers felt like a sentence.
And then he spoke, "Her name was Alice," He paused then, seeming to wait for her comment that wasn't coming. "She was my best friend." He smiled at her then, and it was so devastating she turned away.
He licked his lips. He wavered in the air before he hunched slightly towards her and the heat from his arm, closer now, was something between them.
"She wasn't like my other friend." He tilted his head. "The one I had before I moved. She was different, but I liked that about her. She was always happy and excited and she was so small, but I knew she was strong." He stopped then, as if the final sentence had burned his throat.
Edward's green eyes faded in that moment. As if at the same time she took a breath and her side went passed that barrier of heat and touched his arm with her inhale, a thousand hands had rubbed them raw.
Bella didn't quite know what to do. She didn't know what had caused his sudden intense and yet strangely subdued reaction. Saying his name seemed like too much to give and the other words had too many edges.
She let them cut. "Tell me about her."
He turned away.
And then he started. The words were off, but there. Fractured but too simple to truly be broken and he said little things that said nothing. Just to speak, just so she could listen.
He told her that her hair was short and dark. She liked to shop. She loved fast cars. She secretly longed to steal one and then finally, the one that made him stop speaking, her eyes were gold.
"I liked them," He told her, swallowing audibly. "They almost seemed to have different layers if you looked at them just right." And then he was fierce, his whisper a shout, "When she was angry and as the weeks went by, they would get darker." His chest expanded and the sentence was there, but he didn't speak it. She wouldn't know until later when everything made bitter sense that what he was about to say was, "They would be black."
Not that she would know, just then, what that would mean and more achingly, what it meant.
"Do you love her?" She asked. She moved away from him.
His smile was a tilted thing. "Not in the way you're thinking." And that was that.
She thought of asking more but he had twisted his body so that he was somehow still sitting and yet lying down at the same time. It was another one of those awkward positions that he continued to put himself in. It was almost like he didn't know how to become comfortable. Like trying to be comfortable was something beyond him.
Her own body, angled away from him, curled so that her right side was exposed and the rest of her was pressed against the wall where it dug into her skin. If it had been weeks ago, she might have moved.
Her eyes fluttered and she liked to think that she slept for a while but there was no indication of any time passing. Edward was in the same position and the wall was still the only thing looking back at her.
She felt excessively warm which was an almost pleasant surprise to the normal feeling of always being so cold, but she was aware enough to realize what this meant.
She wondered if it would be enough to kill her.
She pressed her burning face against the stone wall and felt it scrape against her skin. It burned but she pressed in farther until Edward gripped her shoulders with his half there faltering hands and pulled her away. He looked at her with murky eyes that didn't see anything at all and then turned away, just like he always did.
And she hated him so very acutely in that moment.
A sudden noise startled her and she made a high pitched sound in the back of her throat that caused Edward to jerk his hand so that it hit a grove in the wall where the stone jutted out in a little sliver.
Edward hissed and pulled his hand back to him. She didn't need to see the dark liquid that suddenly had her remembering that same liquid on the lips of a creature that had her head swimming. The soft silver sweet scent had her losing the feeling in her legs and the blood drain from her face. She had become a dead weight and the stone arched into her back to the point where the pain registered and her eyes watered.
She gasped in evasive air and Edward was pulling his hand close to his chest with his vague eyes suddenly inexplicably wide. He blinked lethargically and his head slumped forward and he pulled his hand even closer to himself and then a soft sound echoed in the back of his throat. It made her own throat close.
The footsteps were almost nonexistent and she was suddenly startlingly sure that the only reason that she heard them at all was because they wanted her to. She felt boneless and lethargic and her mouth watered with nausea, but the bread she had eaten two days ago wasn't there for her to throw up. She was almost relieved.
And then they were there.
They were almost hideous in the way the light made shadows on their cheeks and their eyes had become bruised shapes that couldn't seem to decide where to sit. They were almost grotesque in the perfect way they smiled and their shoulders curved and their hands curled.
They almost were and would have been, had the thin layer of skin not hide as much as it did.
Two of them stood tall and their bodies swayed with every odd little step and they seemed too small for their size, as if the strength was unnatural and new. Their dark red eyes that were almost black but not, and they flickered like an animals would in every direction but Bella noticed something that had her eyes burning and her stomach seizing.
Their wild animalistic eyes always returned to Edward's carefully protected hand.
The hand that wasn't really protected at all.
The third person in the odd disfigured group was a girl. Her head was tiled to the right in a curious childlike wonder but her smile was a sharp thing.
It was the little girl that had her pressing even further into the wall and her fingers flinching to somehow reach Edward but not quite be able to. She felt her face twisting and her body seizing. Her toes curled and the filth on her arms burned.
The girl — the wrong one — spoke, and Bella's breath was a wail unspoken in her chest.
"Edward," She said with an odd kind of intimacy unnatural in a child's tone and gave him a smile that was edges and broken pieces. "It's been a while."
His eyes were focused on the ground. He wouldn't look up, or he couldn't. His head slumped forward to almost touch his bent knees that cradled his hand and chest and she saw in flickering images what this meant.
She looked away to focus on something other than the disfigured child that she thought might have been beautiful had she not seen what rippled beneath her skin and turned away from what her future would be.
Her fingers dug at the floor until she thought they might bleed and then she was picking at her skin because her hands were ruined things at her sides that weren't doing anything and she could see the world ending.
The sigh that came from behind the door had her flinching her eyes up to look. Edward's legs were straight in front of him, lying unnaturally on the floor. His left hand was at his side while his right was raised before his face as he looked at the blood that was so dark it looked fake.
His pupils were blown wide and there was only a faint layer of green. His eyelashes fluttered and then he was looking at the creatures that stared fixatedly at the blood.
He wiped his hand on his filthy jeans and the red smeared in and became almost nonexistent except for the fact that it wasn't and everyone was looking while Edward wasn't and that meant so much more than anything he could have tried to say.
Her thoughts rambled and mixed and she saw too much and everything was spinning.
The two at the girl's side twitched and their lips curled and Bella's own lips parted in some kind of twisted imitation.
She didn't know what to do.
They weren't supposed to be there. They weren't because she had almost convinced herself that what she had seen and what Edward had said wasn't true. Her mind had twisted and pulled and there had been another reason for being there that eluded her when she tried to grasp it, but that was okay because she knew it was there, she just couldn't remember it.
Bella didn't mind not remembering…everything was okay that way.
She felt a sickness in her skin that was far too warm but there was a sudden flare of understanding. She knew as she looked at them and then at Edward, that it wouldn't be what would kill her. She felt something akin to grief.
The girl was speaking again. "Edward," She sighed. "We were supposed to meet today." There was a beautiful kind of cruelty in the way her lips moved and a bright tooth flashed. "But it seems that our plans will have to change, seeing to the fact that you would be killed before I even get you to the hall."
Bella thought the girl might have laughed but the rush of too much, drowned out anything that was said.
The girl's eyes flickered and then she was looking at Bella and Bella was trying to look back because she didn't want to be Edward who couldn't look but whispered words of death when he showed his hand.
The girl smiled and said, "Our plans will just have to change."
It felt like the rattle after a door slams as Edward pulled his hand back to his chest.
A/N: Well I meant to be a lot better about this whole updating thing but at least it's here. I actually wrote three different versions of this chapter and finally settled on this one, so I hope everyone's happy with it.
Also, from now on I'll be updating my profile page to say how far along I am with the next chapter so everyone's not in the dark when the update will come, and it will give a warning if I'm struggling. As I seem to be doing quite a bit.
Oh and I want to give a huge thank you to inkybot5 who gave me the most amazing review. It really helped me try and not get too frustrated with my writing. Thank you so much!
Hope everyone likes the chapter and please tell me what you think!